Derek Jarman, the great British filmmaker, artist and provocateur, passed away 25 years ago on February 19, 1994. He was 52 years old. His late masterpiece The Garden was made in 1990 as Jarman was struggling with AIDS. Shot on Super8, 16mm and HI8 video, starring a young Tilda Swinton and featuring a sublime score by Simon Fisher Turner, The Garden is a visually stunning, deeply personal film about homosexuality, Christianity and persecution filmed at Jarman’s coastal home in the shadow of a nuclear power station.
“Derek Jarman had two gardens. One was in Dungeness, he started to work on it after being diagnosed with HIV. ‘The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end,’ he wrote in his journal. The other one, this film, opens with images of a man sleeping on a desk, his face resting on an open notebook as a voice proclaims ‘I want to share this emptiness with you,’ before a series of vignettes begins in which hallucinations of a two-man-Eden become progressively unravelled. This is a cinema of ecstasy; extinction looms from all sides, friends die silently, queer bodies are whipped, hanged, stoned and chased by cameras. There is the growing impression that representation means violence, means imprisonment. But this is also a cinema of sharing, stemming from the hope that it is indeed possible to share one's dreams, failures, uncertainties and cares. Jarman repeatedly shows himself tending the garden and offers us snapshots of mushrooms, stones, butterflies, poppies, snails, crows, clouds, embraces and music: a whole ecology of images.” —from the 2019 Berlinale Programme
The restoration of The Garden premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 8, 2019. It is now available for booking on DCP in North America.
UK - 1990 - 95 mins - Color
UK - 1993 - 76 mins - Color
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